Painting in Pieces?

ok, im not exactly the best painer in the world, so when im trying to paint the backside of my SM's bolter, i often get his chest pad, and i mess up on many other little detials. so i was wondering, could i paint each piece seprately? has anyone tried it? does it work?

Yes, it is possible, I swear by it. I paint every mini like that. It is really a personal preference thing. I just finished painting my mini for the LO painting competition today and assembled it afterwards.

the main problem with painting on the sprue is the removal of mould lines and deailing with the bits where attached to the sprue,

the main problem with painting in bits off the sprue is actually holding on to the pice you are painting.

Myself I usually paint half assembled, eg marines I will attach the base, legs and torso together then paint everything then put it together once I have finished, but as per dodge, ti is personnal preference

I do it as well, at least the part where I cant reach with the brush. You don have to paint all the part or even the hole part but I always start painting them separated. I gets really annoyed if I cant reach with the brush.

I generally decide what sections I need to paint seperately when I am 'dry-run'-ning putting the mini together.
If I can't get a brush between some pieces, I will paint them seperately.
To do this, I attach each seperate piece to a long pin, and then hold them in a pin-vice. Simple, but hugely helpful!

I use paint pot lids and bluetac. Much of what I paint might not been seen (such as the base of a marine's neck or the lower reverse of a backpack etc), so I either give it a base coat or nothing really. I always paint marines with: not backpack, bolter or head attached.

Yeah, I used to INSIST on assembling the minis first. Did two tac squads of custom-chapter SMs like that. Now, I'm doing it in pieces. I think the "last straw" was trying to paint my lascannon guy for my new Dark Angels.

I said, "Nope, forget it!" and pulled him apart.

MUCH easier. I have a five-man squad I'm building for him. When I get back to painting my DA, I'm gonna do just the legs and torso assembled. The heads will be on "spikes" of paper clip until they're painted. Yes, it looks weird, but trust me, you'll save yourself a LOT of aggravation in the end, and the paint job will look SO much neater!

Mickey: "You're just making this up as you go along!"
The Doctor: "Yuuuup. But I do it brilliantly!"

I'm not a fan of painting in pieces. I find it intereferes with smooth highlights and can sometimes make the shading look a bit disjointed. With figures like marines though, I will leave the bolter and usually the shoulder pads off and paint them separately. This is particularly handy when they are undercoated different colours (eg White marines to become Blood Angels, but black for the bolters).

Many figures have an inconvienient arm that crosses they're body and painting is made much easier by painting that separately. Canew's avatar is a good example- that figure would be much easier to paint with the heavy bolter off and the point of gluing would be nicely tucked away under a huge shoulder pad on the completed figure.

I just painted 60 orcs.....Head/torso/legs together and arms separate. I found it easiest to dab some super glue to the arms and attach them to an old piece of sprue. They snap off easy. Just don't use the plastic glue.

I must agree with the in pieces idea. As with most people, I paint legs/torso/head in one and the rest seperately, but of course it changes depending on which model (blasted 1-piece Eldar aspect warriors!!).

Another thing I am going to try ASAP is paint the model whilst blu-tacked together. This way I can remove mould lines and get blending correct, and just take off bits I can't reach. Only problem with this is that blu-tack doesnt hold models together greatly, especially metal ones. So another idea is to pin each join (mainly on metal aspects) but not glue them, so again they can be disassembled when required.